Writing every day

It's Friday again.  The week flies when you squeeze in as much writing and competition entering as possible.
I've discovered Ad Hoc on Twitter - a great 150 word flash contest with a cash prize.  Always worth a go.
Today's Flash Friday entry:

Harvest Time

My belly took its time growing big. Quickly I knew somethin’ was up, when I felt all spacey and super tired. That old nine months is everlasting eternity, at the same time as being over in a flash.

I dreamed of it. In there, all safe and hugged by my body. A bean growin’ at the speed of light, until it was wedged into me, leavin’ me all breathless and full to the brim.
Ma said to cherish the feelin’s as I weren’t never gonna have the baby to hold. A deal was struck with a Priest, of all folk. He was in the next town over, and his wife was just about dyin’ to have a baby of her very own. September was gonna be my harvest time.

A Priest gotta be a good man. You’d better believe it. No man of God is going to be mean to a little baby. That’s what Ma tells me over and over, and slaps my face if I keep up the caterwaulin’.

She don’t know it was a Priest did for me. I ain’t tellin’ her, neither.

 

I decided to try and write in an accent, and from a very young teen POV.  Poor kid, I wanted her tough but likeable.  I wanted to have her protect her mother's feelings about religion at the end, even though her 'Ma' has been domineering and unsupportive of her predicament. 

 

I recently heard that I've been shortlisted for a MASH writing contest, a short story which had to include the words Taxes, Vinegar and Carpenter.  Hilarious to get those disparate terms in smoothly.  Very challenging. 

 

I'm looking forward to October/November, when the anthology with my short story in is due out.  Original Writing seem a lovely bunch of folks.  It'll be my first time in print for years, bar a poem I got into an anthology ages ago.

 

Castlecroft Writers had a fabulous 6th meeting with ten attendees.  We're a right old bunch of cuckoos.  We ended on a game of consequences, kind of a random plot generator.  Very funny to read out the bananas combinations of one person's character going through another's event in a third's setting, and then a fourth person's consequence. 

 

Keep writing, keep trying, keep open and enter as many writing comps as you can! More tries = more chance that a pair of eyes zipping over your words will like them.

Go!